Reading Response #2 - Week 4

Like most of the other responders this week, I too found Charles Eckert's essay on Hollywood's presence in the fashion industry very relatable.  Just today, as on most other days, I found myself reading the pages of weekly tabloid magazines.  While indulging in the regular celebrity gossip, I always find myself analyzing the clothing and trends of the stars on the pages.  Granted I may not be able to afford the clothes they are wearing, but can certainly find similar trends for reasonable prices.  Anyway, the point I am making is that I don't usually read the magazines dedicated to fashion such as Vogue or Harper's Bazaar for my fashion updates (don't worry, I'm not taking fashion tips from Britney or anything) but I like to see what the celebrities are wearing to find out what's popular.

I always knew subconsciously that stars had this power over us, that even if what they were wearing was hideous and not in style, it would be considered a "fashion-forward" by someone, but I never really understood the roots of this fascination until Eckert spelled it out for me.  Of course now the fashion choices of many stars are much more extreme than many years ago, but that again today's society as a whole is much more extreme.  This fascination, I believe, stems from the very reason stars are stars.  In the beginning, according to Dyer, people were more interested in the people that had "achieved something in the world," or what he called the "idols of production." (Now that phrase about people achieving something in the world is a whole other topic of discussion as far as stars go, ie Oprah.)  Today we still have this interest in people like Donald Trump and Bill Gates, but because of their achievements, they have reached star or celebrity status.  It seems like anyone that has had great achievement, which in our society means making huge sums of money or inventing some great new technology, instantly becomes a celebrity and therefore the public yearns to know everything about them.

As far as I know, celebrities are people.  That's all they are.  And most of the time, they are told what to wear; they don't set trends, their stylists do it through them.  Or better yet, if they're lucky, designers will get a celebrity to wear their clothing and market their clothes for them.  However, if all of us "regular people" had a personal stylist or designers asking us to wear their clothes, we would still not be trend-setters.  Even though I too am guilty of reading the gossip magazines and turning to celebs from fashion advice, I still can't understand why we do it.  Is it because this is just the society that we live in?  How did it get this out of control?  Hopefully learning more about the history and evolution of the star will answer these questions.